One of my officers, with whom I had established a breakfast mess, was billeted in a house (or rather palace) of the latter description in the Rue de Poivre (Pepper Straet). The rooms in this were of magnificent dimensions, wainscoted with some dark wood, the doorways and ceilings ornamented with arabesques. They were scrupulously clean, but very bare of furniture, the little there was (merely chairs and tables) clumsy and antique--folding-doors with their ornamented encasements reaching to the ceiling--neither door nor window frames painted. The whole house was as deserted and silent as I have described my own to be--gloomily obscure; but this, as the weather was hot, formed a recommendation, for it was deliciously cool. The only inhabitants ever seen either by my companion or myself were the lord of the mansion--a most precise, polite, frigid little sexagenarian, and an old domestic in cotton jacket and _bonnet de nuit_, who sometimes assisted Q.’s servant. The old gentleman was, however, most civil in going through the ceremony of offering everything his house afforded, but what that might be there were no means of ascertaining, for we never either saw or smelt his kitchen. The garden, an irregular area of no great dimensions, presented a grove of trees with thickets of underwood, threaded in all directions by narrow serpentine walks; and to prevent a sense of confinement, I suppose, the high boundary-wall was painted from top to bottom in distemper, with the representation of a distant country sky and all. The effect of this, in my opinion, was vastly inferior to that which would have been produced by covering it with vines or flowering creepers. Another of our people dwelt in a house of quite a different description--it was one of those already mentioned as having a blank basement, and giving but a single row of large French windows to the street. My friend’s apartments were truly luxurious. The walls were covered with French paper representing the scenery of some tropical region, the furniture (of which there was even a superfluity) all elegant; the large windows, adorned by ample draperies, looked out upon a lovely and luxuriant garden, and the light that entered through them was broken and tempered by festoons of vine leaves that hung across them, whilst the air came redolent of delicious odours from the ocean of flowers below, and the ear was entertained with the sweet warbling of birds suspended in pretty cages of brass wire in all parts of the house. The family consisted of several females--handsome, elegant, and simple in their dress; women--servants, scrupulously neat and clean, but not a man. These ladies must have been people of some consequence, if we may judge from the number and respectability of their visitors. The general aspect of the population of Ghent, as seen in the streets, &c., did not strike me as having anything very peculiar in it to attract the attention of a foreigner; the numbers, however, and to